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Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Systems Client Experience Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson )

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Wrapping up my coverage of the 2013 IT Security and Storage Expo in Belgium, I noticed some interesting things in the other booths.

The EMC booth had a whiteboard so that clients could do some one-on-one collaboration. All of their cocktail waitresses were wearing sharp pin-stripe coats with matching mini-skirts.

Another booth had a "virtual graffiti wall". Using a "digital spraycan", you could write on the wall. I am not sure what connection this had with anything the company had to offer, but perhaps they also wanted to collaborate with attendees on solutions. In either case, it was very cool, and brought a lot of traffic.

(FTC Disclosure: I work for IBM. I was not paid to mention any of the other companies, their products or people on this blog post. Mentioning other companies is not to be considered an endorsement of any kind.)

There were some interesting costumes. Leila from [Aerohive] wearing a "bee costume" complete with black wings. Hans from STS in a bright orange business suit. (Orange is the national color of Belgium). Sophie from Fortinet handed out champagne. The plastic glassware were cones that snapped onto her tray, but they had no flat bottom to rest your glass down, so you had to hold it the entire time until you finished drinking it. The Homer Simpson sticker eating the Apple logo shows the Belgians have a sense of humor!

The NetApp booth had a huge banner claiming that "Data OnTap" was the #1 storage OS. Obviously Windows, AIX, Solaris and Linux aren't consider "storage Operating Systems" per se. Is NetApp claiming they outsell FreeNAS, the only other storage OS that I can think of?

While IBM and I.R.I.S-ICT easily won the "Best Looking Big Booth" award, I have to give the "Best Looking Small Booth" award to my friends at Hitachi Data Systems. Like EMC, the Hitachi team did not have any equipment on the floor, but they made use of their tiny space by having a Japanese theme, with cocktail waitresses in kimonos.

Continuing my coverage of the IT Security and Storage Expo in Brussels, Belgium, we had a nice reception Wednesday evening.

Clara handed out Ceasar Chicken salads. Joelle handed out small rolled up pieces of duck.

Ilsa is an IBM expert in System x, VMware and the PureSystems family on hand to help with the demos and any client questions. I.R.I.S.-ICT employee Ans is only in her 20's, but is recognized as one of Belgium's leading experts in System z mainframe. I used to be the lead architect for DFSMS on z/OS, so we had plenty to talk about.

Of course, the best time for the press to ask for interviews is during the reception, where everyone is relaxed and ready to speak. I am "media-trained" which allows me to speak to the press about IBM matters. I do a lot of these interviews either over the phone, or on camera.

I took a picture to capture the typical setup. Mandy on the left is asking me questions, while camera operator Lisa focuses on my body language. The trick is to spend 80 percent of the time focused on your interviewer, and then 20 percent looking into the camera for strategic pauses. If Mandy decides to use any of the footage, she will be sending me the YouTube video link!

Belgium is a small country, and many of the IT storage people know each other. This made for quite the party! Our group closed up the booth around 8:30pm and we went over to join their friends at Arrow and Huawei. Here is Maiva from Huawei.

Continuing my coverage of the IT Security and Storage Expo in Brussels, Belgium, we had some great storage solutions on display at the IBM and I.R.I.S-ICT booth.

Here my IBM colleague Tom Provost is showing the front of the "Smarter Office" solution. The second photo gives the view from behind. While I always explained the solution from the front of the box, many of the more technical attendees at this conference wanted to inspect the ports in the back.

Two [IBM System x3550 M4 servers] that can run VMware, Hyper-V or Linux KVM server hypervisor software for your Windows and/or Linux applications. These are two socket servers that can have up to 16 x86 cores each.

A Local Console Manager (LCM) with rackable keyboard, video, and mouse.

In this next example, the IBM team combined a BladeCenter S chassis that can hold six blade servers, with a Storwize V7000 Unified which offers FCP, iSCSI, FCoE, NFS, CIFS, HTTPS, SCP and FTP block and file protocols.

If those configurations are too small for your needs, consider the Flex System chassis or full PureFlex system frame. The rack-mountable 10U chassis can hold the Flex System V7000 and 10 compute notes. The PureFlex frame can hold up to four of these chasses.

IBM and I.R.I.S-ICT also had an IBM XIV Gen3 and a TS3500 Tape library on display.

Continuing my coverage of the IT Security and Storage Expo in Brussels, Belgium, here is my post on the presentations I gave during the week.

There were four presentations each day. Of the five rooms, I was assigned one room in which to give all of my presentations, room 3. My room was quite large, with sixty seats.

It is a good idea for public speakers to understand Dutch, French, German and English in Belgium. In recognition of the fact that Belgians are multi-lingual, I started each session with "Goede Middag, Bon Jour and Good Afternoon!" and ended each with "Dank U, Merci and Thank you for attending!"

Time

Wednesday

Thursday

12:00 to 12:30pm

What is big data? Architectures and Practical Use Cases

What is big data? Architectures and Practical Use Cases (repeat)

12:45 to 1:15pm

An IBM Storage solution for small and mid-size business? The Storwize V3700!

An IBM Storage solution for small and mid-size business? The Storwize V3700! (repeat)

1:30 to 2:00pm

A New Generation of Storage Tiering

A New Generation of Storage Tiering (repeat)

2:15 to 2:45pm

Replication for High Availability, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Storage, Server and Network in one Flexible and Integrated solution! The PureSystems family

The sessions were all half-hour slots. The only presentation that I had a challenge getting down to 30 minutes was my session on "New Generation of Storage Tiering" in which I was asked to cover Easy Tier sub-LUN automated tiering, Server-to-Storage cooperative caching, Texas Memory Systems, hierarchical storage Management (HSM), Active Cloud Engine, and SmartCloud Storage!

Helping me out were three local IBM interns. From left to right: Joelle, Clara and Bryan. I hadn't noticed that there were only short breaks between sessions, all of this time consumed with one-on-one discussions with clients, so the interns were kind enough to fetch me snacks and drinks.

Joelle and Bryan speak Dutch, which is similar to the local Flemish language. Clara speaks French, which came in handy for translations.

I would like to thank my room monitors: Jolijn, Ella and Chloe. All three are local college students hired by the conference for the two days to scan name badges and count bodies in seats.

(I had to ask Jolijn to write her name on a piece of paper because it is Dutch and I had no clue how to spell it for this blog post.)

While it might appear that room 3 was "The Tony Pearson Show -- all Tony, all the time!" there were actually worthwhile sessions in the other rooms. Fellow blogger Jon Toigo [known for his DrunkenData blog] presented "Storage Infrastruggle 2013 -- Containing Storage Costs without Sacrificing Access, Protection or Management". My IBM colleague Ron Riffe presented a vendor-neutral look at Storage Hypervisors.

If the attendees wanted copies of my presentations, they were directed to get their name badge scanned at the IBM and I.R.I.S-ICT booth, all the way at the other end of the hall, and my presentations would be emailed to them.

(For those who have missed it, you can find all five of my presentations uploaded to the [IBM Expert Network] on Slideshare.)

(I am back to the USA in Portland, Oregon this week, so these posts relate to last week.)

However, that wasn't to say I didn't encounter a few challenges during my week in Belgium. The first was getting to the venue. The Belgium Expo is a large complex of buildings to the north of the city. The local IBM team suggested I go to the facility a day in advance so that I would be able to see where it was and how to get there.

I was staying in the center of town, in Place Rogier section. I had many transportation options:

Take a taxi. It was raining this week, so finding a taxi was difficult.

Take the bus. The Bus #260 goes directly from my hotel to the Belgium Expo, but only goes once an hour.

Take the metro. The metro operates frequently, and the Haysel stop is right in front of the Belgium Expo complex.

Upon arrival to the building complex, I was unsure of which building I needed to be in. Standing in front of the beautiful Building 5, I found this legend that provided the answer: Building 8. In front of Building 12 was a map that showed where Building 8 was located on the campus.

For this event, IBM joined forces with IBM Business Partner I.R.I.S-ICT to have a fabulous booth, with plenty of experts and equipment demos. As is often the case, the team had to work late into the night to get all the equipment set up, all the podiums and counters constructed, and the demos fully operational.

Apparently, I was not the only one to have troubles finding the place, so I did not feel alone. Some with cars drove around the complex several times before figuring out which parking lot to park in. Others parked at the first spot they found, and still ended up walking as much as I did.

For future reference, If you plan to attend any event at the Belgium Expo, either (a) ask for more explicit directions, and (b) plan to do lots of walking!

Well, I am back safely from my trip last week to Chicago, and now I am writing this in Madrid, Spain, on my way to Brussels, Belgium for the IT Storage Expo.

For those who have asked how the construction on the new Tucson EBC is going, here are a few pictures I took on Friday. As you can see, it is coming along nicely. The official grand opening will be April 2.

Did you miss IBM Pulse 2013 this week? I wasn't there either, having scheduled visits with clients in Washington DC this week, only to have those meetings cancelled due to the [U.S. sequestration cuts].

Fortunately, there are plenty of videos and materials to review from the event. Here's a [12-minute video] interview between Laura DuBois, Program VP of Storage for industry analyst firm [IDC], and fellow IBM executive Steve "Woj" Wojtowecz, VP of Tivoli Storage and Networking Software.

(Update: Apparently, IBM had not secured re-distribution rights from IDC to post this video prior to my blog post. IBM now has full permission to distribute. My apologies for any inconvenience last week.)